Thanks for this wonderful website and forum. Much of the time, my life is a chapter from the x-files and I do indeed enjoy it that way. I am a writer and dream researcher with a strong history spanning 23 years with lucid dreaming and precognitive dreaming. I have read and studied all the papers from 1882 published by the SPR and 1927 with J.W. Dunne and "An Experiement with Time" and onwards.

My interest with precognition is not because this is a belief system; rather a matter of fact from the perspective of personal experience. At one point when I was 15 years old, I started noticing that some of my deja vu experiences have their origins in dreams I have had in the past, days/weeks/months prior to the onset of deja vu.

It covers my research and that of many others as well as providing a deeper look at this phenomena. That is until the skeptics get a hold of it and ignore the evidence and attack the source (namely me) as a fraud. All their arguments are ones of convince; not truth. Simply ignoring all the existing peer-reviewed journals on precognition, the documented cases and historic record. All in favor of spouting some decree that they know everything and those who know something else are simply delusional.

Yet I find these arguments in the face of a long standing history of evidence to be the delusional and irrational; how can one say that if I woke up to day and saw that sun; that I must prove it with the scientific method and validate that I did indeed to as I said I had did. Personal experience is how reality is observed; and through personal experience I have observed the relationship between dreams and waking reality. No skeptic can scrub a lifetime of personal evidence and awareness that is gained through first-hand experience.

If J.W Dunne applied the scientific method and verified his precognitive dreams back in 1927; just because I have had them does that mean I must do also? Clearly there is a point where I can just enjoy these experiences and grow with learning the mechanics and science behind them without irrational thinkers screaming fraud at something that is experienced and not believed.

I think skepticism is healthy, but psudoskeptisism is not. Also, I do appreciate how people who haven't had experiences with precognitive dreams would indeed be skeptical. The reality of this phenomena was not known to me until I was 15 years old. And even then, it took a long time to have the personal validation that indeed something more then post-dictation was occurring, and my abstract presents insights into that personal investigation.

It would be many many years before I started to read and find out that more people had this type of experience and so forth. It is why I can go back into 1882 research with the SPR and on ward to appreciate the challenge that science has to try to understand this.

I'll also argue like Lucid Dreaming which was and sometimes still is treated skeptically (Malcolm 1959) until finally empirically measured in the late 1970's, so too will precognitive dreaming which has a long history spanning into the earliest of religious and philosophical beliefs in the historic record will finally be fully measured and realized.

It becomes a point of knowledge and lived experience that most psudoskeptics cannot wrap their mind around because they have pre-built bias and mandate to shut down what they construe as an impossibility; although in 2009 scientists have verified retrocausality and that the future from that context can affect the past and must in some state, already exist.

So the science is emerging to tackle this hard problem. It will only affirm what I already know from the perspective of first-hand personal experience.

The evidence in favour of retrocausality is much in dispute, so let's hold off on varification.

As for pseudo-skepticism, that word is thrown out around here a lot, but I don't think its being used properly. We're better off avoiding that word and just going straight to discussing the evidence.

What evidence do you think is the strongest in favour of precognitive dreams? Do you have any publicly available studies (preferably on the internet and not behind a pay wall) that you want to present here for discussion?

There is also interesting developments in neurological findings in the Hippocampus with mice suggesting PREPLAY and possibly a knowing which could help narrow down neurological centers related to precognition. (2010) http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v4 ... 09633.html

I think that is a start, there are a lot more, probably not as easy to access such as J.W Dunnes an Experiment with Time (1927) and all of the 1882 SPR research onward that I do relate to as a result of my own personal experiences.

Some historical anecdotes:Abraham Lincoln

In 1865, two weeks before he was shot dead, Abraham Lincoln had a psychic dream about a funeral at the White House. In the dream, he asked someone who was in the casket and they replied, "the president of the United States". He told his wife about the dream but neither of them took it to heart - for on the night of his assassination he gave his bodyguard the night off.

Mark Twain

The American writer, Mark Twain, and his brother Henry once worked on riverboats on the Mississippi. One night Mark had a dream about his brother's corpse lying in a metal coffin in his sister's living room. It rested on two chairs, with a bouquet and a single crimson flower in the center. He told his sister about his dream.

Weeks later, his brother was killed in a massive explosion on a riverboat. Many others died and were buried in wooden coffins. But one onlooker felt such pity for young Henry that she raised the money for an expensive metal coffin. At the funeral, Mark was shocked to see the coffin as it was in his dream. As he stood over Henry's casket, a woman placed a bouquet with a single red rose in the middle.

The feeling the future debate is just getting going. Critiques on both sides of the fence are being published. The most recent in the salvos is one by Bem himself responding to Wagenmakers critque. There is a great thread in the JREF forum discussing this at a much higher level than I can. So it seems wise to let that process play out. Plus we're very early into this, replications are just getting going, to mixed results.

I'll try and have a look at your other links. May take me a little while...

The reality of this challenge is quite astronomical as there are clearly problems with data collection and the issues of the subjective paradox and how it is easy to measure brain wave activity, but not information processing in the brain. To weigh in on future research that may finally produce more extensive evidence I am looking at MRI research such as that from Yukiyasu Kamitani at ATR Computational Neuroscience Laboratories in Kyoto, Japan where they are able to reproduce information from the visual cortex and render what people are seeing.

This is very exciting progress into an area that has long been an issue for the hard problems of consciousness. We are extracting inner data from the result of visual information processing in the brain. If this does evolve into dream recording and they speculate that it will over time. We may start to extract precognitive images and have them measure up to future events more accurately and telling then the textual versions, or sketches which lack the finer details one might expect from this research.

Now as a person who has this experience and with it dimming with age; my relative peak period was during the ages of 16-24 with a gradual and steep decline into now 38. That said, during my observations of this phenomena, there is too many personal accounts of events which are literal and specific to the future event.

Like the debate of Lucid Dreaming as part of skeptic conjecture in 1959 and finally with more modern research into empirically measured brainwave activity and controlled eye-movements; science may finally reach the required technology to satisfy the nature of precognitive dreaming once and for all.

Then all this research and anecdotal evidence will have more gravity for the questioning skeptic. However, understanding this non-linear and non-localized event I feel is a step forward for science. For me the argument of skepticism is long abandoned with the realization of a valid and real experience within the human psyche. I simply seek to understand what I have also been affected by; and it's definitely precognitive dreams in the literal context.

We do certainly dream a lot; although there are a lot of underlying factors when people sleep that do not yield a lot of dreams. Largely, people enter a state of sleep induced amnesia and wake up with very little if any dream recall. Quite often such recall quickly fades and is left unrealized or stored in longer memory stores.

In the case of chance, certainly there will be dreams that suggest common mundane events with a casual occurrence which simply is not precognitive dreaming. Literal precognitive dreaming is more like taking a video sampling from a future reality and watching it on playback when the future event occurs. The dream and the future event it portrays are if perceived clearly, identical events. Video mirror images of each other down to specific details.

Mark Twain was specific about details, the metal coffin, the flower arrangement and his brother having died. These events matched his dream when they occurred, it's a more likely anecdote of a literal precognitive dream.

In my experiences with similar events, sadly I too have observed loved ones die with specific details pertaining to their death. For example my cousin and his friend dying in a pick-up truck accident nearly 1 year before it happened. It was a dream I told his mother and my other Aunt. The details of which were accurate and both himself and a friend would die in a pick-up truck on their way home for Christmas the following year. At his funeral my Aunt approached me and relayed her memory of me sharing the uncomfortable dream.

I have a personal experience with this, not an interest based on anecdotes or literature. The events can be identical to the future events they represent. It is a non-linear and non-localized look at future data in the form of a dream. It is why I find this area so fascinating... how is such an impossibility remotely possible? It's really a paradox and one worth understanding for science.

Hi Dreaming. Personal experiences are why I support the 'paranormal' as a little known branch of physics. It's a tough one when it comes to personal experiences because you know what you've experienced but yet you can't prove it to no one. It's funny how you mention dreams because the one area of my experiences (it was actually my mom who had the dream) that I'm hesitent to talk about was the dream my mom had that accurately predicted his death 2 weeks later and even where he would be before he died and how he died. It was freaky and I can only imagine how she felt to wake up from that 'nightmare' to only have all the details come to life just 2 weeks later. There was the other odd thing with his phone number digits being the exact same numbers as the date he was killed on. We actually never caught that one (the phone number) until about half a year after the tragedy.

There are skeptics and believers on here but welcome to Scepcop. I hope you take part in the discussions.